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No Amnesty for Telecom, Uphold Constitutional Rights

No Amnesty for Telecom, Uphold Constitutional Rights

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“The legislation directly conflicts with the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, requiring the government to obtain a warrant before reading the e-mail messages or listening to the telephone calls of its citizens, and to state with particularity where it intends to search and what it expects to find. Compounding these wrongs, Congress is moving in a haphazard fashion to provide a “get out of jail free card” to the telephone companies that violated the rights of their subscribers. Some in Congress argue that this law-breaking is forgivable because it was done to help the government in a time of crisis. But it’s impossible for Congress to know the motivations of these companies or to know how the government will use the private information it received from them. And it is not as though the telecommunications companies did not know that their actions were illegal.” – Studs Terkel, New York Times

Tell Congress: No Amnesty for Verizon and AT&T
Bush wants retroactive immunity for the telecom companies to thwart civil liberties lawsuits that threaten to expose his own lawbreaking. If these lawsuits aren’t allowed to go forward, we may never know the extent of the Bush administration’s illegal efforts to spy on American citizens without the required warrants.

“Why is the president of the United States trying to get the telecommunications companies off the hook for their illegal activity? He is supposed to be upholding laws, not encouraging companies to break them. Businesses that break the law should be held accountable. We expect these companies to keep our personal information private, and if they break the law, there should be consequences – not a re-write of the rule book. The House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees wisely rejected the president’s efforts to carry the water for the telecom companies and voted down an amendment that would add telecom amnesty to the bill. Members of Congress should not re-write laws just to get giant companies off the hook. They were elected to represent the American people, not big business.” – Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office

Tell your representatives to only pass a FISA modernization bill that has individualized warrants for people in the United States and NOT to provide telecom companies with immunity for breaking the law.

H.R. 3773, the “RESTORE Act of 2007,” currently being considered by the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees allows blanket, basket or program “warrants.” This means the government can vacuum up the international telephone calls and emails of Americans. Blanket, basket, program, no matter what these “warrants” are called, they aren’t really warrants at all, and they aren’t constitutional.

5 Things Specter Won’t Say about Cheney-Specter Spying Bill

5 Things Specter Won’t Say about Cheney-Specter Spying Bill

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  1. The Cheney-Specter bill makes following the protections in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act totally optional. The bill would change the law so that foreign intelligence surveillance of Americans could be conducted without following FISA’s requirement of individualized judicial review of wiretaps. The bill would change the law to allow the president to ignore FISA’s protections and unilaterally decide which Americans to wiretap, indefinitely and without any mandatory check to protect individual rights. The bill also gives President Bush support for his currently untenable argument that FISA does not apply in wartime by deleting the provisions saying FISA does apply in wartime. If the bill passes, presidents will have multiple avenues to circumvent the statute, rendering moot its protections for Americans’ civil liberties.
  2. The Cheney-Specter bill does not require President Bush to get a warrant for every wiretap of every American currently subject to the NSA’s illegal warrantless wiretapping. President Bush’s so-called “concession” to submit a “program” to the FISA court to approve is not required by the bill—it’s conditional. Only if the bill passes exactly as it was written by the White House or with additional White House changes has President Bush “promised” that he will submit one of his secret surveillance programs to the FISA Court. Nothing in the bill requires him to do so, and the Cheney-Specter bill has stacked the deck so that the court will hear only the administration’s arguments and is directed to approve surveillance without ever knowing the name of every American wiretapped and any facts supporting such surveillance. Nothing in the bill requires any future president to get approval of programs of surveillance let alone actual warrants based on evidence a particular American is conspiring with al Qaeda.
  3. The Cheney-Specter bill legalizes President Bush’s illegal spying although Congress doesn’t really know all that he has directed the NSA to do regarding people in the US. The bill rewrites FISA to legalize the surveillance President Bush is currently conducting in defiance of the law. Yet, the administration has stonewalled congressional attempts to learn the true scope and nature of all of the illegal surveillance the administration has secretly authorized. Specter, himself, has called President Bush’s NSA program illegal “on its face,” yet his bill provides statutory power to do more than the president has admitted and it expands the NSA’s power to search Americans’ calls, e-mails, and homes without any warrant under FISA.
  4. The Cheney-Specter bill allows law enforcement to enter Americans’ homes and offices without a warrant. Landlords, custodians and “other people” would be required to let law enforcement officers to access Americans’ computers and telephones, and no warrant is required, simply government say-so—under the expanded powers in the bill. This measure flies in the face of the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
  5. The Specter bill does not enforce the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that no warrant shall issue but upon probable cause stating with particularity the things to be searched and seized. Specter’s bill so broadly redefines whom can be spied on without a warrant that countless Americans would be subject to secret NSA surveillance. All international phone calls and emails would be subject to warrantless surveillance under the bill’s changes to the law. Plus, emails and other Internet traffic would be subject to monitoring if the government did not know the physical location of every recipient of an American’s email. Furthermore, the bill creates a new type of generalized surveillance power, which, while it requires court approval, does not require the government to identify each target in the US, the basis for such surveillance or the method of monitoring each American—wiretaps, bugging or other devices. Under this exceedingly low threshold, the NSA could win approval for conducting surveillance of countless Americans while keeping secret from the courts and Congress who is being monitored and even whether the spying approved actually helps protect against terrorism.

A federal judge has already ruled that the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program violates the Constitution and must stop. But instead of listening to the judge, the White House and its allies are continuing to pressure Congress for new, expanded and unchecked government spying powers. Help convince Congress to support the rule of law, not limitless executive power.

Take action! Tell your members of Congress to oppose the Specter-Cheney Bill and other dangerous proposals that threaten your rights.

(ACLU – American Civil Liberties Union)